Cellular Healing

In classical mythology, Prometheus was chained to a rock, where a vulture pecked out his liver every day. It would have been nothing short of a catastrophe, but, this being mythology, the organ grew back every night. In fact, liver tissue actually will regenerate, if less than half the organ is removed. (That's why transplants are possible from living donors.) (Article continued below...)

Now science wants to do for other parts of your tired, aching body what mythology did for Prometheus (minus the vulture). Need a new knee, bladder or esophagus? Why not grow one? "We all did it once, in the womb," says Alan Russell, director of the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh.

Leading the charge are doctors like Stephen Badylak, director of the Center for Pre-Clinical Tissue Engineering at the McGowan Institute. Already his research techniques have been applied to more than 1.5 million patients needing new tissue to repair the rotator cuff or lower urinary tract. Now he's working with the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine (AFIRM) on a program to regrow fingers and limbs lost in battle. He spoke with NEWSWEEK's Anne Underwood. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: Your work sounds like science fiction.
Stephen Badylak: Starfish, salamanders and newts can regrow a lost limb. Human fetuses can also regenerate many structures during the early stages of fetal development. But that ability diminishes or disappears by the time we're born. The question is why, because the information is still there in our DNA. We want to resurrect fetal wound healing.

Tell me about your work with AFIRM.
Because of innovative explosive devices, soldiers are returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with lost fingers, lost hands, lost limbs. The only treatment options now involve prosthetic devices. For a 20-year-old, the rest of life is impacted in a negative way. The Defense Department is approaching this in a Manhattan Project mode. It's put $100 million on the table to address these horrific problems from a regenerative-medicine standpoint.

Will you really be able to regrow fingers and limbs?
In the foreseeable future, I doubt it. Fingers and limbs are very complex. They include nerves, bone, skin, muscle and blood vessels. They're also large. Limb formation in a fetus is on a scale of a few millimeters. In a human, you're talking 20 pounds of flesh and bones.

But you've been able to regrow large portions of muscle.
A soldier in Texas had been injured by an explosive device in Afghanistan and lost a large portion of muscle in the upper portion of his leg. This loss significantly compromised his strength and range of motion and his ability to engage in normal activities. We helped regenerate a portion of that muscle, which is amazing. That never happens spontaneously. Over the next year, we'll treat another eight to 10 soldiers.

How much of the muscle has grown back?
The results might be considered modest by some standards, but they're significantly better than anything tried before. He's had maybe a 12 percent increase in muscle mass, as measured by CT scan, and a 7 to 10 percent increase in strength over a two-month period. He wants a second procedure.